mrCharlie

I guess the only good news (and perhaps part of what puts an end to this idea) is that this would probably hurt those charter/private/religious schools as well, since our state legislature keeps finding ways to send them more and more public funds. Someone posted an overview of this proposal on our local community Facebook page earlier this week. We live in a very good school district that heavily relies on very high property taxes, thanks to the current school funding formula. The only question anyone asked is "what will replace property taxes to fund schools", to which there seems to be no idea of any answer. That universal skepticism has me someone optimistic. This sort of sounds like a reasonable proposal at face value -retirees don't have to pay taxes to keep living in the house they own. In practice, it would mostly just be a huge handout to McMansion builders, real estate investors, and landlords.

I believe the state only requires transportation for K-8 students living more than two miles from their assigned school. Thanks to the way district consolidation went in the 1950's, I went to a large, low enrollment, very red rural school district in SW Ohio. After a few failed attempts to pass a operating levy, the district pulled high school bussing right as I started high school (along with eliminating any classes that weren't state requirements). School was 10 miles from my house via curvy, 55mph US 50. Walking wasn't an option, neither was biking - so freshman year my second-shift working mom had to interrupt her sleep in the morning to drive me, then pick me up right before going to work. Sophomore year was a bit less awful since we carpooled with a friend in the morning. We finally passed an income tax before I entered junior year. Busses were restored, but not much else. I was pretty excited about the DeRolph ruling my senior year, hoping to prevent future generation from repeating my experience. Glad the state got that all figured out in the years since...

As much as I'm never excited when ODOT (with zero hesitation) fires the money cannon at the latest highway project, two-lane 33 in Athens/Meigs does feel a bit sketchy when traveling southeast. Certainly better than it used to be before the super 2, but cars (and lots of trucks) traveling full highway speed makes it feel like a head-on collision is imminent. While US 50 is now divided and bypasses Parkersburg, that route looks to be an extra 27 miles. Guess the good news is it does look like the alignment would allow the current bridge to be twinned without too much trouble.

Excited my next Mac or iPhone could very well have a locally-sourced CPU.

This bill solves a non-existent problem, at the expense of making faculty uneasy for their future, and ability to tell the actual truth. The quality and respectability of our state universities is going to suffer when professors are forced to teach "both sides" of every controversial issue (conspiracy theories and holocaust denials). This will make it very difficult to convince high-quality out-of-state students and faculty to come to Ohio in the future. Really hoping that includes football players. Our horrible state legislature has been trying to pass this for years, but the real surprise is that Dewine signed with a big smile on his face. My wife started applying to academic jobs out of state earlier this year when this was proposed yet again. We don't expect much to come of it, blue state institutions have their pick of applicants looking to leave red states. Fortunately we do have other options - she would have no problem getting a job outside of academia, probably for much more money, or at a private institution. Regardless, if that happens, it won't be in Ohio. I've always defended my home state and wanted to stay here, but this (after redistricting reform losing in November - my last real hope for the state) has me more than ready to live someplace else.

I was definitely hoping Sundance would land in Cincinnati, but this was in the back of my mind the whole time. The festival would have lost its prestige and importance over the years just by decline in the industry (aided by "elitists" ignoring it after the move), but Cincinnati would have been the scapegoat. Pretty much the only movies we watch anymore are kids movies, or bad movies on Rifftrax. Neither of those types of films are Sundance material. The rest of our viewing is TV shows.

In five years of DAAP, most of that time spent in studios overlooking Burnett Woods, I think I visited Burnett Woods with friends once or maybe twice. About as many times as we visited the roof of Crosley. I think once was looking for different stuff to draw in our freshman foundation class, and maybe just killing time between classes. I remember skipping rocks on the lake, and climbing around on the Chamber of Commerce Stonehenge structure. MLK is pretty intimidating to cross, not something you want to do without a good reason. Burnett is also on the opposite side of campus from most of the dorms. I commuted, but many of my friends did not.

We considered that, but then it's hard to bail a few days early.

My mother-in-law used to live in North Myrtle Beach. It was a surprisingly annoying drive, really not great route from here to Columbus. I wouldn't exactly advocate building a highway to it though - and one you are there, it's kind of awful.

I haven't tried this one yet, but I do know it has a big fanbase and generally considered superior to the other two Brazilian steakhouse chains we have in Columbus. We actually only tried churrasco for the first time a few months ago. My wife had a great idea to get us trying new restaurants - we dine alphabetically. Basically, either the nationality, cuisine style, or name of the restaurant we go to on the weekend has to start with the next letter of the alphabet. For "B", we went to Brazilian Grill & Bakery off Cleveland Ave. Not only was the food great, but it felt like an authentic cultural experience. All you could eat meat (we mostly had sirloin) and buffet (which included an amazing chicken "pot pie" called empadão de frango) was $25.99 each. The kid ate for half price, despite eating more steak than we did. Everything was super high quality and absolutely delicious, and the atmosphere lively. We truly were the only ones in the place not speaking Portuguese. We got some desserts to go which were also incredible.

Heath is in the process of annexing a very large parcel of farmland to allow a developer to build 600+ single family homes, and that parcel is in Granville schools. Granville is at 95% capacity, this will force at least one or two new buildings. Granville EVSD will need to pass a new bond issue to pay for it, so all residents in GEVSD will have out already very high school taxes go up even more. • Heath is moving forward because this benefits Heath with new middle-upper income residents to pay the city more income tax. One option would be a special assessment to pay for a school, but Heath is already doing this to pay for infrastructure improvements. • GEVSD residents have no say in this process, despite the fact we will be effectively heavily subsidizing this development. Granville estimates that the new subdivision will all 960 students, produce $3.3 million in property and income tax revenue, and create an operating expense of $12 million a year. • Granville has a cost per pupil of $14,400, below the state average of $15,427. With the recent changes in the state funding formula, GEVSD receives $2,200 per pupil in state funding. The rest is all paid in local taxes, which are almost entirely residential. (There are ongoing efforts to attract more commercial development within the district.) • Private Granville Christian Academy receives an average of about $8,000 per student in state funding, thanks to the state's EdChoice Scholarship program. Full tuition there ranges from $9600-11500. The biggest problem here is overlapping jurisdictions with competing interests, a thing the doesn't seem like it should exist. This is really all benefit and no downside for Heath and its current residents. The state tax formula is garbage. Property values in Granville are high in no small part because the schools are good, which also means incomes are high. In our state's usual goal to cut state taxes so local entities get to be the bad guys and ask voters for money to actually pay for things, the state decided we have the ability to pay a lot locally, and cut state funding way back. While that is technically mostly true, it does have limits. School levies are become much harder to pass around here lately, and I'm very concerned my son's schools will be overcrowded in the coming years. I'm a little of torn about the EdChoice scholarships, and the fact the state provides such a comparatively large amount of money to Granville Christian Academy students. I'm not holding anything against those who choose to take advantage of that program - I went to an absolutely garbage largely rural public school in Clermont County, my parents could not afford private school so I was stuck there. This might have given the option to go elsewhere (though realistically I'm not sure where I would have actually gone instead - I would not have liked any sort of religious school). But I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that money is probably coming in part from state money that could otherwise be supporting public schools. That doesn't seem right- the state is often providing significantly more money to private, religious schools (and private charter schools) than it is to some public schools. The actual motives here are even more suspect when one looks at how this program became a reality. It would be MUCH more fair if the state provided all districts with, as a baseline, the same amount per pupil offered for EdChoice students. Additional funds could be paid locally for communities that want better schools, just like private school parents often still pay something beyond what the state scholarship covers. Good schools and education are critical to having a good, working society, and it feels lately like we might be paying the price for some of those cutbacks. https://www.thereportingproject.org/big-crowd-hears-details-of-proposed-600-home-subdivision-and-how-granville-schools-are-preparing-to-manage-growth/ https://www.thereportingproject.org/granville-officials-urge-heath-city-council-not-to-bulldoze-over-granville-schools-with-housing-development/

The Apple Music top artists list is a bit deceptive because it's not close to my only music source, but it's the only one that makes a list I can post. It ends up being mostly stuff I haven't bought yet (I've since dropped $$ at Shake It on Wussy albums), and the shared family playlist for in the car when. I still hear a lot of LCD Soundsystem on the two radio stations I listen to most (Cincinnati's Inhailer, SiriusXMU on satellite). I'm definitely a fan - but the real fan iat our house is our 7-year-old son. They are his favorite band, so they are featured heavily on the family playlist.

I keep telling myself the extra space probably won't matter too since it will still probably cost less to heat and cool than the current house. It's better sealed now, but the energy audit we had done a few years back included a blower door test. Essentially, they seal a strong fan across the front entrance and measure airflow to see how tight the building is. A first for the crew running the test, the now-gone wall-to-wall carpet in our upstairs bedroom ballooned off the ground several inches during the test. At this point we're not in a big hurry to move, unless something changes it will mostly revolves around my wife's job (since I WfH). I'm not entirely opposed to a purple neighborhood as long as there is some sense of community, amenities like sidewalks, and they value public education.

We've "browsed" for houses on and off since the kid was born, mostly just open houses. Our current 3BR 1776 sq ft house is in perfect location right in town and we love it overall, but it was built in 1906 so storage is minimal, and we have the usual old house maintenance. The downstairs is divided into multiple smallish rooms, which means some go underutilized while others are crammed. When we bought our house, I definitely had the "new houses are junk" mentality because most of the ones we saw in our preferred price/size range were indeed low quality, despite their often more usable layouts. Now that we have some more flexibility on what we can afford, we have found well-built newer houses do actually exist. Problem is they are usually twice the size of our current house, not even including finished basements. Maybe justifiable if an older parent were to join our household at some point, but feels excessive otherwise. Plus, most of the quality newer houses are in 1990s-2000s yuppie boomer neighborhoods with HOAs and manicured lawns, and a majority of residents we don't agree with politically. I think the only exceptions were in Gahanna and Worthington. Still too big though.

Facebook really could have been great, but they just can't seem to help themselves. I joined in 2009 when we moved from Ohio to New England (then later back to Ohio) as a way to keep in touch with family and friends I wouldn't necessarily see or talk to otherwise. I did post a lot of "check out this great restaurant" or "look at this project I'm working on" type posts relatively early on, as did a lot of people. Then I think they started getting greedy. They've constantly made it harder and harder to see a clean, chronological feed of only people and pages your follow, as @Gramarye noted above. That's around the same time the ads started getting creepy and intrusive. And I started seeing lots of political posts, which no doubt engage a lot of people but aren't what I'm on Facebook to see. As seems to be the case with most of my friends, I rarely post anything anymore. I don't want Facebook doing any additional data mining to sell more ads, and I don't feel like dealing with hyper-partisan responses on non political posts from people who clearly follow nothing but political pages (boomer uncles). The main I really use Facebook anymore are groups, which I still feel are largely inferior to traditional forums (ahem) but do have the advantage of a much larger user base - especially geographically. The only way to really know what's happening around Granville anymore is to follow the most popular community Facebook page, since local media has declined so badly. I follow a few regional mountain biking pages for trail updates and such. I also follow a few local businesses, since that seems to be where they most actively post updates. Those sorts of things are what makes up the bulk of my feed lately, and that's approaching unusable with the AI slop Facebook keeps trying to shovel in there to keep up the engagement.

I'm actually a little bummed about Public Lands, we went there fairly regularly. It was much more like REI than Cabela's, with a good selection of Patagonia, Hoka shoes, and other outdoorsy stuff.

A fairly common task for my job is shooting and retouching product photos. The products I receive are usually prototypes, are usually made of brass, and are used as part of a mechanical system. Very function over form, so cosmetics aren't a priority for the factory - but they still need to look nice in our marketing materials. I usually laugh off any widely-touted Adobe features. Usually they are magic in the announcement demo, okay for casual use, and have major show-stopping shortcomings in a production environment. I still manually mask all my studio-shot photos (put on a transparent background) with the paintbrush tool in Photoshop, because all the tools designed to make it easy produce garbage results. Anyway, I assumed all the AI features added to Photoshop would follow this precedent. Then I tired the Generative Fill tool to help remove an ugly discoloration from the brass body of one product, as well as fix an overexposed area of the image. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was actually helpful. My normal process would rely heavily on the clone and healing brush tools to create a touchup "patch" on a layer, being careful to preserve the texture and lighting. I selected the area I wanted patched and told generative fill (in plain language, though it did okay unprompted) what I wanted done. It produced a touchup that was 90% of what I was looking for, with multiple options to choose from. It was then a matter of making some small tweaks and blending, and the result fully meets my standards. I don't see AI tools replacing the bulk of my work anytime soon, which its largely creative and deals with new products in a niche industry. Hard to draw on a LLM for stuff nobody has ever seen before and a market few know how to actually talk to. But I do appreciate that AI saved probably 30 minutes of tedium out of the 4 hours I spent retouching that particular photo. Where I do see this eventually making waves in my industry are with the outsourced (often overseas) service providers that get hired to do this sort of touchup work, and other low-end design projects.

European Fanta is indeed pretty good, and very much its own thing vs the American drink of the same name. I think it's more meant to compete with Orangina and the like, rather than be a typical American "orange" soda, in a region where mineral water is popular. I wonder if the issue is the high-fructose corn syrup itself, or that it's added (in large quantities, since it's cheap) to just about everything. Which effectively recalibrates people's pallets for sweetness, which makes sure it stays everywhere. Sodium in huge quantities where it doesn't belong is probably as big, or worse of a problem. I have noticed the growing popularity and availability of unsweetened seltzers, at least in grocery stores. That's what we mostly drank when we lived in New England, Polar was widely available and excellent. I'm now seeing it Ohio more in places other than Jungle Jim's (along with Polar Orange Dry - which is not unlike euro Fanta, though it has HFCS). I noticed that recalibration when we first switched to seltzer, but after getting used to it regular soda becomes disgustingly sweet. That said, I mostly just drink plain water anymore. Probably the bigger problem is the popularity of fast food in the American diet. Not only is there often HFCS and such where it probably doesn't belong, and an absolute ton of salt, but healthy-ish drink options are rare. If you don't want to drink liquid sugar, your options are diet soda (there have been legit - not RFK level - studies questioning how healthy that actually is), unsweetened ice tea, or water.

Chuck Cleaver (responsible for both names) is much better at making music than naming bands. Wussy is routinely called one of the best bands in the country today, easily on the level of Wilco or Yo La Tengo, and yet they remain pretty obscure. Definitely a band worth checking out. This CBS story provides some insight about the names: And this video is a great taste of their music, with some very endearing banter between songs:

I don't really use Apple Music all that much, mostly listening instead to Cincinnati's Inhailer Radio while I work since I get distracted picking out my own music. That's how I finally got into Wussy over the summer, which (along with their former bands and various side projects) accounted for more than half of my time listening to Apple Music this year. I easily spent as much or more time watching their stuff on Youtube, their KEXP live performances are amazing. Little Miami was the first proper Wussy song that really grabbed my attention, and my top track for the year. Not knowing their work, the title initially had me thinking it would be some kind of fun local reference. I was half right about that.

Dublin has Cornhenge, about time we got something on the east side.

This absolutely made my day. Sherrod Brown for Governor!

I don't usually vote Republican, but I always respected Portman. I thought he was a good senator with Ohio's best interest in mind. It would be nice to get back to some civility and dignity in office. I'm also really hoping to see Sherrod Brown back in office after the 2026 special election. Like Portman, he was always one to put Ohio above party.

Before Issue 1 failed, I was pretty optimistic Ohio would eventually turn things around and at least become purple again. Ohioans as a whole seem to mostly want to do the right thing, but too often it doesn't matter without a huge and expensive statewide ballot initiative. And that can simply be tanked by our SOS, with the supreme court signing off. Our state elections anymore are mostly decided in the primaries, and those who care enough to vote in the primaries will pick the most idealogical pure candidate. Media coverage and general interest in state and local races is pretty minimal, so too many voters will just pick the people with the (R) next to their name without any additional thought. I've lived in various parts of Ohio for all but two years of my life, and my family is still here. I generally love it here and have always defended Ohio, but I'm become increasingly pessimistic that what Ohio is to me will continue to exist. Some of that has already started to happen, in small ways. We used to do most of our shopping in Newark/Heath, but at the start of the Trump era we just began to (subconsciously) feel like we didn't belong there. We started doing much of our shopping in Columbus. COVID hitting and vast mask compliance differences between the two areas made that change permanent. My wife is one to always explore potential job opportunities. I work remote so I can go anywhere, but I've always been a bit resistant and preferred to stay at least somewhat close to home. Yesterday, I told her that despite loving the little blue dot we current live in, it is starting to feel like a very small blue dot - and I would be okay to move to at least a blue county, if not a blue state. I hate to admit defeat, and don't love the idea that the redder this state becomes the less competitive national races are. But I don't want to have to take one for the team indefinitely, especially with a kid.

In some fairness to New Albany - while they don't do the kind of large, multistory residential that most of us on here are fans of, they also don't have as many "giant house with a giant yard" type developments as most Columbus suburbs. There are quite a lot of patio home and townhouse developments in the area that are quite dense for SFH, and those have common areas rather than yards. They also have a pretty extensive network of bike paths and sidewalks that actually connect things. That said - when we drive through that area, I do see a lot of walkers when the weather is nice, but I think it's probably more about exercising around their own neighborhood. There is also often a lot of distance between those dense-ish neighborhoods and anything you might want to walk to. I would guess at this point most people still do exactly as you describe and drive most places, it will be interesting to see if that continues as development continues and demographics change.